Our Town

Is Thornton Wilder's Our Town the most produced play in America? There's an apocryphal story that there's a production somewhere every night. Regardless of the exact statistics, it is certainly a hugely popular play, one we've known forever and consigned to the realm of the "safe" classic, heaped on the theatrical dustbin of community and educational theater. Replete with stiff collars and Pepperidge Farm accents, we know this play.

How, then, does a new on-the-cheap production become the toast of Chicago and New York? How does it bring possibly the most hardened theater audiences in the world to tears consistently?

Maybe ... just maybe there's a key here to what good directing is: it starts with reading. Wilder's introduction decries the box set, and explains his attempts "to capture not verisimilitude but reality" then sets the stage quite clearly:

No curtain.
No scenery.
The audience, arriving, sees an empty stage in half-light.

Brooks Atkinson hit the nail on the head in 1938: "By stripping the play of everything that is not essential, Mr. Wilder has given it profound, strange, unworldly significance."

It's shocking to re-read the play and see just how spare, cold, and clean it is. The steady accretion of the barnacles of sentimentality gets in the way of seeing what's there on the page, and received "wisdom" keeps us from reading. It's a reminder to all directors and actors: read what's there, not what you think is there.